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This performer can be compared to great singers with names like Bob and Bruce, but he’s pretty sure no one else shares his name: Bhi Bhiman (Bee Bee-men). He is a first-generation Sri Lankan-American singer/songwriter who is playing at 8pm this Sun…

This performer can be compared to great singers with names like Bob and Bruce, but he’s pretty sure no one else shares his name: Bhi Bhiman (Bee Bee-men). He is a first-generation Sri Lankan-American singer/songwriter who is playing at 8pm this Sun…

It was a special time for jazz in the Bay Area. For most of the ‘70s and the early ‘80s, a small club called Keystone Korner presented a dazzling array of jazz greats from around the world. The interest in the jazz genre that the Keystone generated still is felt today and recalled in a new book of photographs and oral history by Kathy Sloane.

The club became a jazz venue when a young San Francisco musician, Todd Barkan, wandered into a rock club looking for a gig. “I just was kind of a naïve hippy that had a jazz band, and actually I went to see Freddy Herrera, who owned this little bar over in North Beach, and I said, ‘Would you book my jazz band?’ And he said, ‘I hate jazz, and plus that, it doesn’t draw. I’m going to open a big rock venue in Berkeley (which became Keystone Berkeley). Why don’t you buy this club, and you can book yourself?’”

Barkan knew nothing about running a night club, but he did know about jazz. He bought the club for $12,500 and with help from family and friends proceeded to turn it into a world-class jazz spot that helped revitalized the idiom, which had been greatly diminished by the rock revolution.

Barkan was able to book the greatest names of the genre, including Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, and the club favorite, Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Kirk, was best known for playing saxophone and two strange sax-like horns, the manzello, and strich, all at once. One scribe wrote he looked “very much like a kid trying to eat three bananas at once. Making this weird spectacle all the more impressive was that Kirk was also blind.”

Regulars at the club also included saxophonist Dexter Gordon, pianist Bill Evans, and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, all of whom recorded albums at Keystone that are still available.

Like Barkan, author-photographer Kathy Sloane was introduced to the club by happenstance. “I was dating a guy named Bob Bray, who was a drummer and he took me to Keystone one night, and I walked in and I was blown away,” she recalls. “He brought me back the next week he introduced me to Todd Barkan and said to him, ‘You should let her come in here and photograph whenever she wants and don’t charge her.’ And Todd said, ‘Okay. All she has to do is give me a photograph of each band that she photographs, and she can come whenever she wants, except on weekends when there were a lot of people.’ And that was it,” Sloane remembered.

Post-World War II San Francisco enjoyed a healthy jazz scene, with numerous jazz clubs dotting the Fillmore, the Tenderloin, and North Beach neighborhoods. But in the late ‘60s most of them disappeared with the rock revolution; by the early ‘70s many of the greatest jazz performers had very little work, but gigs at the Keystone helped rejuvenate their careers.

There were a few locally-based artists who headlined, too: Bobby Hutcherson, John Handly, and guitarist Calvin Keys. Keys recalled, “You were on the desert dying of thirst and then you came upon the waterhole. That’s what KK was. It was a waterhole. Keystone was something special, because of Todd.”

Today, frontline jazz is often presented in concert venues at prices that contrast sharply to Keystone’s bargain admission. “First, you gotta lay out a lot of money if you’re going to have dinner and catch a set. It was another era then, and jazz was not a high ticket and high maintenance event,” says California-Poet-Laureate-Emeritus Al Young who was a Keystone regular back in the day.

The music and the prices were a great lure, but so was its warmth and friendliness. “The audience could go into the back room, there were no doormen, nobody asked who you were and if you weren’t important enough you couldn’t do that,” Sloane recalls.

Rick Baskin was a young law student and a Keystone habitué.

“It was dark, it was smoky, it was intimate,” he says. “You were close to the musicians, it was unpretentious. It was the real deal. You could feel the musicians. You could talk to them. They were right there in front of you.”

For the musicians and the listeners the family atmosphere, the soulful atmosphere at the club, was enhanced by great food.

“The food worked well with the music,” says Harris. “As a matter of fact, Rahsaan would sing a song about, “Eat that fried chicken. Eat that fried chicken now. People who did not eat fried chicken, they ate brown rice, sautéed vegetables, and corn bread. It was healthy food. It was very healthy. That was our vegetarian meal that sold out every night. If I remember now, they were like $2.50 for a dinner.”

Despite the respect and loyalty, the curtain closed on Keystone Korner in the summer of 1983. Larger Bay Area venues like Kimball’s and Yoshi’s had appeared and prospered, and the careers of many of Keystone’s regular attractions were healthier than ever before. And, as their agents lifted the musicians’ prices, the little joint next door to the police station had more trouble than ever paying its bills. When the Keystone was padlocked by the Internal Revenue Service, Todd Barkan exited to New York City, eventually becoming artistic director of Dizzy’s, the jazz club that is part of the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex.

Jazz these days is different. The close-knit sense of community between the players and the audience is rare, but Kathy Sloane’s photographs preserve the spirit of Keystone. “In retrospect, it was extremely unique,” she says. “There was no club I’ve ever been in where the musicians were permeable. There was no separation. That doesn’t exist now, and after KK closed, there was no place like that, certainly not in the Bay Area.”

The music you’re hearing is by the Wild Rumpus New Music Collective. The eleven members of this ensemble will be playing world premieres of works composed especially for them on Saturday (12.10). Performance time is 8pm at San Francisco’s ODC The…

For more than a year now, BART’s board of directors has been discussing whether – and how – the system could stay open later. Right now the trains start their final runs at midnight, leaving many patrons scrambling to catch the last BART home, especially on the weekends. The board had been considering running later trains just one night a week. But last month they officially tabled that plan, voting to look at late night bus service instead.

In discussions about extending BART’s hours, one word comes up over and over again: maintenance. BART officials say closing the system for a few hours a night is crucial to keeping it working, especially as the cars age. We sent KALW’s Casey Miner to find out what they actually do down there in the wee hours.

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CASEY MINER: You might think BART stations would be quiet at 2am. The platforms are empty, no trains rushing through. But they’re not quiet. In fact, the noise is deafening.

Huge machines run back and forth on long stretches of track, grinding down rails and carrying new ones. Crews deep in the tunnels take huge saws to pieces of metal and cranes drop other pieces on the ground.

DON EMMONS: Okay, got your flashlights?

Until recently, Don Emmons was BART’s assistant superintendent for ways and facilities. He actually just retired at the end of last month, but before that, he kept track of everything going on in the system, during the day, and after hours. He drove me around to a few stations on a recent early morning to show me what goes on after the gates close.

EMMONS: Yeah, so right now the trains are all heading out to their final destinations of rest.

After 37 years with the agency, Emmons doesn’t talk about the train system the way you or I would. Instead, he speaks fluent BART.

EMMONS: So this is an M line blanket coming down right now.

Here’s the translation: The Mlineis the section of BART that runs from West Oakland all the way through San Francisco, down to Millbrae. A blanket is a section where they’ve powered down the rails, after the last trains pass through.

EMMONS: Then they’ll do M17, A25 after that which is San Leandro, I’m sorry. My wife cracks up because I’m like, “C53,” and she’s like, where’s that?

Once you get through the jargon, Emmons’s point is pretty simple: Maintenance crews need a safe area to do work, and they can’t have it until after the trains are gone.

EMMONS: What happens is, the time frames they have to do work in get shorter and shorter the further out you go.

This is the crux of BART’s maintenance issue. There are more than 200 miles of track to keep up, and only a handful of yards where heavy machinery can be stored. Upkeep includes everything from physically inspecting train cars to replacing long sections of track. For a big job like that, it can take more than an hour just for the crews to get set up. Depending on where they need to go, they might not even start working until 1:45am. Meanwhile, the first morning trains start running at 4am. So workers have to be completely cleared out before that.

PAUL OVERSIER: It’s sort of like ready, set, go.

Paul Oversier is BART’s assistant general manager of operations.

OVERSIER: So we have people and vehicles and trucks and pickup trucks at the standby at those locations, waiting for the last train of the night to pass by. We drop the power, put all the other safety measures in place, and away they go.

The tunnels are closed for 13 hours each week. Oversier both say it’s not enough.

OVERSIER: Stuff goes wrong every day.

Multiple times every day. The system is 40 years old. A lot of parts have been replaced over time, but a lot haven’t. And when they do need replacement, they’re not always easy to find.

OVERSIER: We have to go truly looking at eBay in some cases to find certain parts that otherwise just aren’t manufactured or on the market anymore.

For example, some electrical components are hard to find, as are some parts of BART’s fare collection equipment. Oversier says shopping on eBay isn’t common. If they need a lot of a certain part, they’ll build it themselves, or order it from one of just a few suppliers around the country. But that’s expensive and right now the agency is in a complicated financial situation; it has a surplus in its day-to-day budget, but nowhere near the money it needs for big projects like car replacement. Oversier says that’s the gap BART needs to fill.

OVERSIER: So when these things reach the end of their useful life it doesn’t take a heroic effort, doing crazy things in the aftermarket to try and find parts.

BART workers don’t just do maintenance at night. They’re constantly monitoring different parts of the system.

EMMONS: Here between Civic Center and 24th Street, we call it the rainforest. It’s almost like it’s raining all the time, with the rain from the underground streams.

When we arrive at the 24th Street station around 2:30am, a crew is already well into the process of replacing a line of broken rail.

Emmons says normally they’d save a rail replacement for the weekend, when they’ve got a few extra hours to work. But they found this broken one on an inspection, and they have to fix it before more trains can run.

If they’re lucky, the rail maintenance crew will finish their work before the first morning trains are due to come through. If not, those trains, and passengers, will have to wait.

The performance style of Jonathan Richman is as simple and naïve now as it was in the 1970s, when his band, The Modern Lovers, was influencing what would become the punk and garage band sounds. He and frequent collaborator Tommy Larkin will be at The … …

The music you’re hearing is by the San Francisco band, The Low Rollers.
The SF Weekly says their songs “bend toward beautiful sing-along harmonies, then trickle down to quiet conclusions.”
You can make your own conclusions this Sunday December 4t… …

The city of Richmond is notorious for its high crime rate and industrial pollution. And the Iron Triangle neighborhood – which is bordered on three sides by train tracks – just might be the city’s most dangerous neighborhood. But inside the Triangle, activist Tania Pulido is cultivating community and social consciousness through the Berryland Community Garden. Pulido is one of the winners of the 2011 David Brower Youth Awards, and she joined KALW’s Holly Kernan in studio to talk about how she got started with the garden, and her social activism.

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TANIA PULIDO: I’m the first-born generation here in the U.S.

HOLLY KERNAN: Where are your parents from?

PULIDO: Mexico. And there’s a lot of immigrants that live close to the Richmond Greenway and they just have a wealth of knowledge about farming and plants so it has been such a great pleasure to be able to hear like all of their knowledge and them wanting to help out.

So in some cases it has been really easy, in other cases, particularly with the youth, it has been a little bit harder to convince them because as we talked about there’s so many other issues with violence and drugs and other things that trying to save the environment is not at the top of their list. But some thing I have been doing is working with different organizations, so I work with the Rye Organization, that is a youth center in Richmond that does popular education. I’m working with Urban Tilth, and Urban Tilth is just a wonderful organization because 80% of our employees are under the age of 25. So a lot of the people managing the garden and farms are 20, 21. You know, the people I work with, one is 16, the other is 20, and they go to Kennedy High, which is really close by. So our strategy is to get people involved by actually hiring people near the gardens.

KERNAN: And you also said that you are reaching out specifically to young mothers?

PULIDO: Yeah, young mothers, there’s a lot of young mothers in Richmond and I’ve been working a lot with mothers, period. And young children. Children, period.

And so the Garden is right next to Lincoln elementary, so it is ideal, and we talk to mothers there, and children love to join the activities because we have art activities, so they love to be part of that and then we give them tours and we give them a little bag and we are tasting things as we go along and they just love that.

And, yeah, I’d definitely feel that after working with youth for almost two years… I felt like what I could do is be that bridge because little kids look up to high school kids, they think they are the coolest things ever. And it’s hard for mothers to get to their high school children, and then so, the way I see it, by getting people involved my age to help organize and to organize events and stuff, I am actually creating this bridge between generations, because I actually want this to be a community. I don’t want to target one specific group because it affects all of us, and I feel by cultivating a common space then we can all gather, in a community with many divisions. I think that’s very powerful.

KERNAN: So Tania, how did you become an activist?

PULIDO: The way I became an activist, I was just basically, like I mentioned before, I barely graduated from Richmond High. Richmond High, our mascot is like an oil funnel, we are the Richmond Oilers, which just shows the power that the refinery has in the community. And you know, the school… I don’t even know how I graduated. I shouldn’t have graduated. I was doing really bad. And I never imagined myself going to a four-year college or anything like that. And, because of that, because of my bad habits, I hit a lot of walls. And it finally got to he point where I started questioning my existence, like, “Why am I here? What am I doing?” And as I asked myself questions I started seeking answers, and I started watching the news a little bit, and I started realizing the power of oil corporations in the U.S. and overseas. And I was like, “Wow.”

And I started learning specifically about Chevron and its facilities in Nigeria and other parts of the world, and just the horrible practices it was applying and the horrible humanitarian violations, and I got really outraged. It got to the point where I couldn’t hold it inside me any longer, I couldn’t just sit down there and keep watching the news. It wasn’t enough for me, so I felt like I had to go do something, and I started contacting everyone I knew who was involved with social justice and activism, and I met a lot of wonderful people.

KERNAN: And getting this Brower award, how does that effect your activism? How does that help you feel part of a larger movement?

PULIDO: It definitely helps a lot because as a youth in a community, there’s a lot of social activism going on in Richmond, but a lot of it is adults and elderly. And when I went to meetings I realized that. Most of the time I was the only young person there, in a lot of the Chevron meetings, different meetings, community meetings, I was the youngest person there. So just being surrounded by youth who are passionate and doing so many great things locally and globally, just so inspiring and it definitely keeps me moving, keeps me motivated and inspired to continue going at this even stronger.

I want to go back and I want to give it my all and just pour it all out, and I feel I am just so grateful for this opportunity to be able to connect and network with so many youth.